I picked this one up because apparently Stephen King said it was THE quintessential book on time travel… and in a literary fiction sort of way, I can see that. Most time travel books are fast and furious on plot and adventure, but not this one. It’s extremely plodding and methodical. I want to say it takes a good 50% of the book or more before the main character, Si, even does manage to venture into 1890s New York, and he does so for a split second in the middle of the night, where he encounters only two other people who don’t see him. But it proves what is possible…
The method of time travel in this book is also quite unique. There’s no futuristic devices involved at all, just mind games, very much like the super cheesy Christopher Reeve film, “Somewhere in Time.” The government theory is that if certain buildings and landscapes remain unchanged from one era to the next, and if their test subjects immerse themselves in media and clothing and currency and etc that is only from the target era, and if they do not see anything more modern than what existed in that target era, then eventually they’ll walk out the door, into that era. Eventually this is just what Si does.
Only toward the very end of the book does Si find himself involved in what I’d call a real plot in the 1890s: he falls in love with a girl who is engaged to a scoundrel, and while he isn’t supposed to interfere (for fear of changing the present–to him, the 1990s), he can’t help himself.
For the most part this is a good read for bedtime, until some of the action sequences at the very end. That’s the time of day when I read it, or else I probably would have gotten bored and given up.
My rating: ***
Language: none that I recall
Violence: present but not gratuitous
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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